You're overloading the word free, a common rhetorical confusion that invariably appears in discussions of this nature. You're not really saying that Apple gave you more freedom; you're saying it gave you more time. That's a legitimate point, but you shouldn't pretend that that's the same thing as "freedom" in any sense remotely resembling what Stallman or foob care about. As such, you clearly don't "strongly agree" with what Stallman is trying to do; he wants software to be something anyone can tinker with, modify and redistribute. Apple wants to give you the "best possible computing experience", which it can only do for you as long as you're in total agreement with Apple over what that means.
By the way, Apple machines are a huge timesink for me whenever I try to use them, precisely because I can't customize the things in the UI that drive me batty (namely, the global menu and the dock, two elements of the OSX UI that Apple holds sacrosanct). I'm orders of magnitude more productive on a machine I've set up to work the way I want than one that I haven't. So of what use to me is Apple's brand of "freedom"? Contrast it to Stallman's, which allows me to tear open a piece of software to see what it's doing or modify its behavior. I know which one I'd rather have.
Actually, it sounds like either machine is a huge time sink for you. Apple machines because you have to deal with how they're set up and your dream OS because you have to spend a bunch of time tweaking everything to be how you want it. For those of us who find the Apple OSX way just fine, we don't have that time sink.
No, it doesn't sound like that. There are many things I like to tweak that make me more productive. Tweaking those things is time-consuming, but once it's done, I never have to waste time on it again. This default window manager sucks? Let me spend a day to throw it out and install awesome. I find myself doing the same things over and over again in Emacs? Let me write and store a macro for it. And you know what the really cool part is? _I can do these things!_. And I usually end up learning something useful about the system.
Now you may find Apple OS X perfect and that's great for you. But what if Apple makes some change tomorrow that bugs the crap out of you? Everytime you encounter that "shitty" detail, a little part of you will get irritated and want to take a hammer to your laptop. Or maybe these things don't bother you. I, however, won't live with something like that.
This is one of the 'worst' qualities of him and his cause. He, and others, seem so thoroughly convinced they've stumbled upon a perfect understanding of what the world needs and don't have the ability to humour themselves with the possibility that maybe others (Apple, Microsoft, ..) are onto something good.
I've noticed that with many of these 'causes' they have a good ideology yet simply lack any actual teaching skills in order to get it across to others especially those who would apparently most benefit from it.
If something is inherently good/true it will stand by it's own characteristics and not need others who prove them though often they need others to teach others. Also, if the masses choose something 'bad' then that is what they receive.
That sounds pretty naive. At many points in history, what we now consider good and true were by no means widely accepted and had to be actively fought for. I'm pretty sure many people thought slavery was a good thing at one time and that women were inferior to men.
People discover truth and until they do they often act in ways that do not align with truth hence, slavery and so on. Some people still think slavery is good and that women are inferior to men.
Actually vast majority of people can never tell the difference between perceived truth and the actual truth.
if we lived in an apple dominated space even the web browser risks being banned and i m sure some of the end users you mention would applaud it.
people like rms are there to wake us from short sighted dreams.
You utterly and completely don't get it. Web apps take away users' freedom by keeping everything but the interface on a locked-down server.
Reasoning like yours is why rms is more relevant now than ever.
I don't know, I wouldn't bet on it. The sw I use the most daily are Vim, bash, python, chrome. Free stuff.
I you say I am not representative, let's check my mother, she uses chrome, that's all. Free stuff.
He has not been hugely successful. He has failed outright at making users care about their software freedoms, which is why it's so easy to take them away from them. The users are the ones who care least about free software, mostly because they see every day how inferior it is to closed software. From the perspective of the average user, apple's stuff is far superior to the "free" stuff. This makes users interpret free in its worst meaning: free as in cheap, free as in low value.
And this is my real beef with stallman's brand of free. His freedom is a narrow-minded ideology, abstracted from what freedom means in the real world. In the real world the only freedom I care about is the freedom to spend my time the way I want. From that perspective, jobs did a lot to make me free, because the switch from linux to apple "freed" more of my time than it cost me.
It's also interesting to think that apple, in supporting webkit and web technology, helped make HTML5 happen, a movement that enables more user freedom than ever before. Even the ITMS, that bastion of evil, is just another web app selling DRM-free music.
I respect what stallman is trying to do, and strongly agree with it. I just think his tactics are dead-wrong.